Terrence McNally (November 3, 1938 – March 24, 2020) was an American playwright, librettist, and screenwriter. Described as "the bard of American theater" and "one of the greatest contemporary playwrights the theater world has yet produced," McNally was the recipient of five Tony Awards. He won the Tony Award for Best Play for Love! Valour! Compassion! and Master Class and the Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical for Kiss of the Spider Woman and Ragtime, and received the 2019 Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement. He was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1996, and he also received the Dramatists Guild Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011 and the Lucille Lortel Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2018, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the highest recognition of artistic merit in the United States. His other accolades included an Emmy Award, two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Rockefeller Grant, four Drama Desk Awards, two Lucille Lortel Awards, two Obie Awards, and three Hull-Warriner Awards.
His career spanned six decades, and his plays, musicals, and operas were routinely performed all over the world. He also wrote screenplays, teleplays, and a memoir. His work centered on the difficulties of and urgent need for human connection. He was vice-president of the Council of the Dramatists Guild from 1981 to 2001.
He died of complications from COVID-19 on March 24, 2020, at Sarasota Memorial Hospital in Florida.
Early life and education
McNally was born November 3, 1938, in St. Petersburg, Florida, to Hubert Arthur and Dorothy Katharine (Rapp) McNally, two transplanted New Yorkers from Irish Catholic backgrounds. His parents ran a seaside bar and grill called The Pelican Club, but after a hurricane destroyed the establishment, the family briefly relocated to Port Chester, New York, then to Dallas, Texas, and finally to Corpus Christi, Texas. There Hubert McNally purchased and managed a Schlitz beer distributorship, and McNally attended W.B. Ray High School. Despite his distance from New York City, McNally's parents enjoyed Broadway musicals. When McNally was eight years old, his parents took him to see Annie Get Your Gun, starring Ethel Merman, and on a subsequent outing, McNally saw Gertrude Lawrence in The King and I. McNally later said: "When I saw On the Town, with Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly and Jules Munshin with the Staten Island Ferry and the Empire State Building, I said: 'That's where I want to live.' I've never regretted it."
He enrolled at Columbia College in 1956. There he especially enjoyed Andrew Chiappe's two-semester course on Shakespeare in which students read Shakespeare's plays in roughly the order of their composition. He joined the Boar's Head Society and wrote Columbia's annual Varsity Show, which featured music by fellow student Edward L. Kleban and directed by Michael P. Kahn. He graduated in 1960 with a B.A. cum laude in English and membership in Phi Beta Kappa Society. In 1961, McNally was hired by novelist John Steinbeck to tutor his two teenage sons as the Steinbeck family took a cruise around the world.